


Illusory Bond

by leiavltrsn



Category: SKAM (TV)
Genre: Angst, Childhood Friends, Depression, F/F, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-08
Updated: 2018-01-08
Packaged: 2019-03-02 03:09:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,091
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13309173
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leiavltrsn/pseuds/leiavltrsn
Summary: An introspection on love bathed in a gloomy lighting and accompanied by issues like falling in love with your best friend and the aftermath of such a cruel mistake. This is definitely canon divergent but this is how I think things would've happened if they had been childhood friends.





	Illusory Bond

**Author's Note:**

> hey there! this is my first work and i really hope it's enjoyable to at least some of you! English isn't my first language and i therefore desperately need your feedback  
> enjoy your read! xoxo

Ocean eyes, plump lips framed by that unmistakable flowy sun-kissed hair – it’s such a cliché to fall for that, such a cheesy rom-com kind of pining that though may seem the most obvious trap, it doesn’t seem to fail to occur. Something loomed you in to those thick lashes that outlined the waves in the eyes of an unattainable lover. Without prior notice or at least the tiniest kind of warning, this fairytale sneaked onto you quietly with almost sly intentions hidden behind sugar-coated lies.  
What makes it so soul-wrecking, however, is that you couldn’t have ever expected it to build up in such a direction that it will have undoubtedly eventually become the main source of your sorrow by the time you’ve had realized that the damage was already done. Make no mistake, this unrequited love story unfolded itself quite correspondingly.

 

*

On a cold December morning, when you were just a kid, no older than ten, the person who sits in front of you in class suddenly turns around and introduces themselves with an almost timid nod.  
‘’Do you want to be friends?’’ is all they have to say to capture your attention since they quickly caught on, they were smart and sensed that you were only looking for attention and friendliness to stave off your affection-starved heart. Having no other choice, you smile back with an awkward gapped teeth grin hoping you haven’t made a fool of yourself just yet. And so, as slowly as your impatient mind will allow you to, you bond with this person without ever questioning their reasons. You bond over your similar music taste, over your attraction to romanticism, over your evergreen passion for history and culture, over you’re almost identical up-bringing and obviously, already having given up on resisting it, you take up some things from them, too. You start caring for animals a bit more intently, you watch the TV shows they like, you start doing better in school because you know how much they secretly value it and you subconsciously start expressing your affinity for them verbally, regularly commenting appreciatively on their behavior, humor and looks.

*

 

Without even realizing it, three years have passed and you still follow them around like a dog on a lead. You don’t know whether they want you around or not but you’re already knee deep in and you simply can’t help it. So three years later, on the first day of school you merely aren’t able to not be stoked when you know there’ll be yet another semester with them by your side. Things begin to look up and it’s only natural that you become hopeful.  
Nonetheless, life isn’t, unfortunately, an American movie, but rather a dark Swedish small arthouse production of a feature film with blue toned frames and low-spirited lines. As months pass, the walls of your room seem to be closing in on you, the pillow under your head tethering you to something real while the duvet which lies over your tired body seems to pull you back to that universe you envisioned all in your head. The books in your library are no longer there to help you grow, but serve rather as a way out of social responsibility. You drown in lines and lines of undecipherable trains of thought, which aren’t even your own. You take to plugging your headphones in and replaying that disheartening Radiohead album instead of blasting music from your speakers, to which you once used to happily dance. The door to your bedroom is always closed with your rusty ‘Keep out!’ poster hanging low on it.  
What is left for you to do in the confines of those haunting four walls is sulk and analyze the questions most thinkers have wondered about. Finally, everything blows up on you when you reach the nihilistic part of your inner monologue, and you ask yourself “Why am I here? Is there any point in existing at all?”. While digesting this idea, your burned-out brain makes the decision for you before you even have time to protest it and you stoop so low that when you stare at your own reflection in the mirror with blood-stained wrists, you don’t even recognize the hazel eyes staring back at you.  
Little did you know that it was addictive. Inflicting pain on your body sticks to you and at least for that month you go to school with a ghost of a smile plastered on your face whilst carefully hiding your arms from the mean eyes of the uncalled for on-lookers. Deep down you know this can’t possibly go on forever, and accordingly, two weeks later, your dad catches you on the act and wastes no time in slapping you across the cheek to wake you up from your stupor. What he doesn’t know, though, is that you liked it as you finally felt the pain you deserved to experience without the guilt seeping into the back of your brain when you put the blade back on the edge of the basin. Except for this climactic episode, no one notices anything, not even the smart and kind person sitting in front of you in class. And you go back to being a wallflower, your scars playing no role in raising concerned looks from those around you. The logical conclusion comes immediately: you are not worth the effort.

 

*

Months pass, you’re still your usual closed off self and there’s no perturbing change of scenery, or at least that’s what you let on. Consequently, nobody asks you what’s on your mind, no one pries further than the complaisant “what’s up?”. So, you decide to abandon any kind of hope there may rest inside of your soul and you take the responsibility upon your shoulders to get better. Don’t get me wrong, you’re simply too selfish and coward to take the final leap. The least you get from this unfortunate depression is that you’re too distraught to remember the giddiness you used to get when you barely thought about that special someone who sat in front of you.  
Somehow you manage to go through with your classes that year without exactly killing yourself physically – it’s just the glimmer in your eyes that perished and which can only be seen on rare occasions when you’re too head over heels to remember your worthlessness.

 

*

What follows next is an egregious trip to Europe, that you felt, despite your young age, is the turning point of your adolescence. This unprecedented shift occurs one day when you look to your left like you’ve done so many times before, this time, however, you can’t help but feel uneasy in your own skin; you feel trapped, silly and crippled when you spare the person by your side a second glance. That night as you lie awake in the middle of the night staring dumbly at the ceiling, you make a final decision: you have to run away.  
* Not even three months have passed and you’re settled in a new home, in a new room and with a fresh kind of energy going on about the house, but as different as the setting may seem, you’re certain that here you’re feeling more at home than you have felt any place else for the past few years.  
With a functional living arrangement, you’re finally able to breathe and prioritize the important things in your life: you go to therapy and get your mental health somewhat fixed, you communicate with the people around you, you rediscover yourself, in short – you’re getting your life back. And naturally, the rekindling of the friendship with the person who always makes you laugh, whom you’ve upgraded to the status of best friend in your head, comes effortlessly and the connection between you two becomes even stronger than before. Hence, the following summer break you choose to spend exclusively in their company.

 

*

 

“You could have foreseen this!”, the voice inside your head keeps crying at you. Of course, this can’t be denied. You were well-aware of the steep slope you were heading toward, of the abnormality of your friendship. Something switched in your heart and once that happened, you should have put an end to it without second-guessing yourself in order to save the residue of sanity you still had. But of course you didn’t. Why would you?  
When spending everyday a school laughing and enjoying life with them, when you could see your distorted wide grin in the blackness of their eyes, when you knew they were always enraptured to see you, when they always chose you as their teammate during group games, when the words they mouthed were dripping with honey and everything sweet and sounded like symphonies and melodious harp songs were put together every time they opened their mouth to speak to you, when all of this unfolded before your eyes, how could you have been level-headed and simply hold back?  
In the end, you should’ve known you’re putting yourself on display at another person’s mercy and that could have never ended well for you. And now, even in the late hour, you could still prevent it from having its full-blown, shattering effect - you could make it stop. Of course you don’t. Instead, you prefer to close your eyes and just enjoy their company for as long as you can.  
They hurt you repeatedly, stabbing you over and over again in the core of your weakness, twisting the dagger mercilessly. They choose other people to hang out with, they don’t talk to you as much as they used to, and they don’t share their passion with you any longer. What they do, however, is send you clips of them having fun with allegedly more entertaining people and when you, on the verge of crying, call them out on their behavior, they say it’s due to their self-hatred and anxiety. If only they knew that you’ve been struggling with self-loathe for as long as you can remember, they could have found a haven in your company. Nevertheless, you are immediately alarmed by their confession because how could you have been so selfish and blind to not notice their innner turmoil? You curse yourself and swear to be more attentive to their demeanor instead of your childish sob-stories. At the end of the day, you’d still set yourself on fire to keep them warm and sheltered from all evil; you’d still sacrifice your happiness for the sake of their own.  
You still fall on the second or third place in their priorities’ list but you cling onto that because who are you to deny even the smallest amount of attention? But now at least, you are content with knowing they are happy and no longer insecure about themselves. Sure, it’s all on your expense, but it fills you up so good with warmth that it’s so, so easy to forget about yourself once again.

 

*

 

With a content grin on your face, you’re more than ready to start summer and put all the problems you’ve acquired during the year behind you. What better way to start your summer than getting drunk with friends on a breezy June night? You drink, you laugh, you’re being young and dumb, but free nonetheless.  
Then, suddenly, while listening to an atmosphere-setting song, they stand up from where they were leaning against the railing of the balcony and lunge forward at you only to catch your lips in a searing kiss. Shocked, you don’t have the presence of mind to reciprocate so they immediately pull back with spit-slick lips glistening in the dark of the night and a wary look in their eyes. Eventually, you come to your senses and grab them by the back of the neck to pull them back in that heartfelt kiss.  
Surprisingly, they make themselves at home in your lap, not once separating from your lips. With their hands safely tangled in your hair and their thighs pinning you against the wall. You both lose yourself in kisses that seem to capture everything you’ve been feeling in a brush of lips. And right in that moment you don’t need the feelings churning in your gut to be mouthed, the uproar in your belly and the buzz tingling your fingertips are proof enough to admit that you have insurmountable feelings for this person because, here, tucked in between their arms, sharing body heat, with their taste on your tongue and their blue eyes staring down at you is where you should have looked for happiness all along.

*

The aftermath of your unexpected expression of love could only be paralleled with infinite bliss. White radiant light fills your vision and the thoughts flowing through your mind are of quiet mornings spent in the warmth of wrinkled sheets sharing soft whispers; holding hands under the desk so the teacher doesn’t see you, stolen kisses in the school bathroom when all the giggling 5th graders had already left for class. But most of all, you imagine yourself with glimmering lights reflected in the black of your eyes finally finding it easy to fall asleep at night because your love for them is reciprocated and the wrongness of it all suddenly pales when they smile that toothy reassuring smile of theirs.  
You crash immediately – the next morning, more specifically, when they don’t meet your eye and keep their head down when you ask them how they feel. Your dazed brain attributes it to the usual backlash of hangovers. It turns out you were wrong. They were merely regretful, ashamed and guilt-ridden. They didn’t feel the bliss, the love, the relief of reciprocating desire or the prodigious accomplishment of finally expressing deeply ingrained feelings. They didn’t feel anything at all. They didn’t think of you as the very embodiment of the ether spreading tiny bits of the unreachable bliss. They thought nothing at all.  
The pitiful looks of your friends besieged you quite soon after he event. They all saw you as the victim of it all as they supposed this new change of atmosphere would do you in so badly that you couldn’t possibly recover. And momentarily you even admitted to it in your head considering the lack of comparison you had to the kind of pain you were feeling. But the thing about damage is that it’s usually tangible and it’s easily understandable where it all stemmed from and thus, face the consequences with ease. With emotional affliction, however, there is nothing palpable as it all falls on the shoulders of your mind to fix and explain everything. Damn your brain for growing so attached to a person, to an individual whom you can’t possibly control or whose next move cannot be foretold and who despite everything could dismantle and tarnish your thorough defense mechanism. There is nothing prophetic about emotional harm as it is up to the willingness and grace of the vaguely intentioned.  
Afterwards, your closest friends finally decide that pitying you is of no use and they approach a new method of helping your state. That is why they struggle to inoculate the idea that what happened to you could be catalogued as assault. It was an enforcement of intimacy, they say. Nonetheless, that doesn’t sit right with you.  
*  
Is it assault if you didn’t say “no”? Is it assault when it was something you craved? Is it assault when you touched them back? Is it assault when your eyes were as lustful as theirs? Is it assault when it was that kind of intimacy that made you break at the seams? Is it assault when it’s everything that’s been keeping you up at night? Is it assault when you wanted it?  
*

 

The following weeks are a constant tossing and turning, fidgeting with everything you do or think. Nothing seems to be in place anymore and all appears to be directly linked to the loss of your best friend. Memories come rushing back to you; fragments of what used to be: summers spent sharing secrets and late night conversations all leading to your imminent fall, a downfall not even once prompted by them. You fell for a chimera.  
For the next few weeks you keep on rummaging through thoughts in an attempt to make sense of everything you’ve been contemplating about. You examine what the exact consequences of your escapade are: will you move on now in the last hour or will you forever despise your soul for choosing such hopeless love.

*  
In the middle of this you are constantly reminded of the fact that all of it was a choice: to fall in love with the only person you can’t have; to always keep someone deeply anchored in your heart who couldn’t for the life of them offer you the love you so desperately needed, who wouldn’t sacrifice their everything for your happiness, and to whom you are hardly a necessity. You start despising everyone for keeping romanticizing this sick kind of obsessive love. People keep chasing a lost cause for the heck of it when it would be much healthier to just find it in yourself to move on and put it behind you. That, however, seems silly reasoning because it’s crystal clear that you don’t pick who you love. Because if it were all down to personal preference, no one in their right mind would choose this kind of love. You ask yourself: is that what I’m missing? A strong willpower? If you could choose who to love or if you could opt out of it when it all goes to hell, who would ever go for such a love? Hopeless cruel love. A love that makes you feel everything at once but crushes your soul, breaks your stride and diminishes your value to the point where what’s left is a barely functioning corpse wandering aimlessly. Who would pick such an infuriating love that makes you go through unbearable levels of pain only to feel those few flickering moments of bliss when your unattainable lover decides to make use of your disposable heart? Who in their right mind would put themselves on the line like that?  
What bugs you, though, is that you truly valued even that fringe of friendship you used to have. They were your haven when it came down to safety and spiritual rebirth because they staved off your ardent yearning for love and profound connection with another. Now however, ensuing your newfound bond, you stand deflated with your heart beating erratically in the confines of your rib cage empty-handed, the frostiness of their fingers once intertwined with yours is the only sheer imprint and reminder that they were even ever there. This reasoning dwells dauntingly on you since it feels like a slap in the face – the collapse of a life dedicated solely to serving the means of cheering up a ghost of a presence. Their tracks suddenly can no longer be severed from your own feelings and reflections. Unawares, it all turns into an amalgam of your own silly delusions and their skittish smiles and then, once again, your blind and undiscerning gestures of love and wholeheartedness and then – then, their reluctant withdrawal of attachment to your intentions, and then: nothingness.

 

*

 

Nothingness is an odd guide mark to conceptualize because it falls within the incidence of countless definitions and explanations. When it comes down to matters of the heart everyone possessing such a thing is entitled to their own inherent simplifications and adaptations so that they fit their own moral compass. Because there is nothing more hurtful and soul-shattering than your brain not encompassing the realities and occurrences orbiting around you; or it not grasping the genuine meaning of gestures and movements and instead choosing to mirror everything that happened to you in a way that in the end leaves you bare because it is the perfect opposite of the reality you’ve been residing in. These inabilities are so damaging that when both occur simultaneously they result in resuming you to a mere body roaming a world of nothing rather than making you feel everything more vividly. The injury is so boundless that by means of this hopeless state of mind, you as a being, become the offerings of your former soul to the master that is sorrow. Your late soul submits so painstakingly to the hurt that even the last grain of emotion left in your body is only regret and disengagement. Your rivers run dry and it is as if the scenery is gradually blurred as to not see anything but your inner turmoil.

*  
With a seemingly crippled soul you push any thoughts of love and companionship aside because you still feel like your brain does not deserve to make you go through that mayhem once again. At this point, what you’re doing is self-preservation, that’s what it is. And so, after almost a year you feel like you’re walking on safe ground and therefore, can dig back in the darkest corners of your brain to look for fresh, objective impressions of what has happened to you.  
Conspicuously, there is no such thing as fresh impression or objective perspective. Nothing changed – you simply got accustomed to the hurt and the bare-heart feeling. But in the end, your thoughts have been consistent.  
Albeit now, when you bare your heart, you let yourself weep, sob, cry, whine and shattering countless pieces on the cold tiles of your kitchen floor as though you dropped that old-fashioned vase your grandmother gifted to you which you were meaning to get rid of but there was too much linking you to it. It’s as though you let yourself spill everything you had left unsaid and finally allow yourself to break without quickly wiping away your tears. Nights on end you sob remembering how desperate you were and how your picture-perfect lover treated you like a project, like a sick idea as to not get bored.  
Ultimately, what your brain comes up with is shockingly fathomable and unequivocal; and you pride yourself in that.  
You can’t have her; never could have. All along it was the delusion of an unattainable love, bound to break and shatter every ounce of hope you had left in your burned out soul. That is undeniably what happened to your spirit – it was mercilessly broken by a visionless desire to open up and dream along with a made-up lover.

*

 

You sometimes hang around the same social circles, exchanging those forlorn shy smiles of recognition. While secretly glancing in her direction, endless unanswered questions flow through your brain. You wish you could ask her: if you were to share my love, would you cradle my heart safely between your warm palms or would you tread on it like you did so many times before? Would you break my fall or would you push me into the unknown abyss? Would you hold my hand and kiss my mind where it hurts the most or would I be yet another device whose sole purpose is to entertain your hollow universe? Would you wrap your arms around my waist and hold me proudly knowing that you own my heart or would you discard me whenever I’m too complicated to be around?  
And, finally, you ask yourself: will I ever be able to love again or will I be stuck in the shadow of an unrequited love? Is it me that is loveless or am I too easy to fool in the name of love?  
Today those ocean eyes are someone else’s mirror and those rosy porcelain cheeks are someone else’s to caress. That contagious smile is no longer directed at you, but away from you. And when you think of the happy times you often wish to go back to, you no longer remember her bubbly laugh as that no longer fills the cracks and scars in your heart. Because you know you will never get the maiden at the end of the fairytale. The only feeling taunting your perception is your worn-out heart and exhausted mind running the same scenario within its confines.  
You are faced with one last solution, which you have grown so fed up with due to how often it has been advised to you. Accept it. Acknowledge your feelings. Learn to live with them. There is no way around it – you are irrevocably heartbroken. Your core, your essence, your drive are now orbiting around bareness and the feeling of unbelonging. It’s the time for you to walk this world with no aim or destination. Feeling alone and loveless, but not defeated.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you so much for reading! you can share your thoughts in the comments' section as well as on twitter @leiathedork or on tumblr @forest-es. let's chat  
> xoxo  
> yours truly,  
> Leia


End file.
